The Depp disaster movie
In a week of High Court revelations about the star’s tempestuous marriage, Jane Mulkerrins asks where it all went wrong
A scompelling, lurid, headlinegrabbing dramas go, it’s proving to be his biggest blockbuster in years. Over four astonishing days this week, Hollywood A-lister Johnny Depp, once the highestpaid actor in the world, took the stand at London’s High Court in a libel trial against The Sun over accusations of domestic violence.
In suing the newspaper for labelling him “a wife beater”, the 57-year-old actor has already provided thousands more column inches of grisly revelations about his short, tempestuous marriage to 34-year-old fellow actor Amber Heard. And she’s not even taken the stand, herself, yet.
Their divorce was finalised in January 2017, with Heard receiving a reported $7 million (£5.5 million) settlement (which she donated to charity) and both parties signing a non-disclosure agreement, barring them from discussing their relationship.
Now, however, in front of the world’s assembled media, the bombshells have been falling thick and fast: Depp’s alleged epic drink and drug binges – including one 24-hour bender with rock star Marilyn Manson, after dropping his daughter at school – and domestic violence on both sides.
Heard allegedly threw a bottle at Depp, cutting off the tip of his finger, after which he wrote on the wall in his own blood; he allegedly subjected her to repeated attacks, including headbutting her, giving her two black eyes and breaking her nose. Depp denies that he was ever violent to his exwife; she denies injuring his finger.
The court has seen texts from Depp to his friend , the actor Paul Bettany, joking he should “burn Amber” as “a witch”, for alleged affairs with Tesla founder Elon Musk and actor James Franco. She accuses him of dangling her teacup Yorkshire terrier out of the car window; he accuses her of deliberately defecating in their marital bed. Whatever the eventual outcome, no one is coming out of this looking good.
The man whose cheekbones once launched a million schoolgirl fantasies has arrived daily to give testimony with his face obscured by a black bandanna, better to mask the ravages of reported years of excess. A fellow journalist, who interviewed him in 2014, reports meeting a sober and youthful-looking 50-year-old, shortly before he was due to marry Heard – she’s “not quite sure what’s happened to him since”.
According to a draft email read in court by The Sun’s lawyer, Sasha Wass QC, when the couple – who first met on the set of The Rum Diary in 2009 – started dating in 2012, he had, in fact, been sober for a year. “How dare you make me fall in love with you, present this other self – your good half,” Heard asked in the email, which she wrote in June 2013 but never sent, “only to rip the mask off once I was in?!”
Certainly, the litany of lurid evidence suggests that the demons presented in court this week have been decades in the making. A 2018 Rolling Stone interview – which spanned 72 hours, many joints and endless bottles of wine – described its subject as “alternately hilarious, sly and incoherent”, and included details of deep financial problems. “Depp has made $650million on films… almost all of it is gone,” the piece reported, while his former management team, with whom he was in dispute, accused him of harbouring “a $2 million-a-month compulsoryspending disorder”.
Along with his private island in the Bahamas, Depp’s 14-property portfolio includes a 45-acre chateau in the south of France and a horse farm in Kentucky. He owns Basquiats, Warhols and Modiglianis, 45 vehicles, an $18million yacht, runs a 40-strong staff, and once spent $3million on a “specially made cannon” to blast the ashes of his great hero, Hunter S Thompson, over Aspen, Colorado. When Wass asked in court if an interview where Depp said it was “nonsense” he spent $30,000 a month on wine was “because the truth is it was considerably more than that”, he replied: “It was.”
Kentucky-born Depp, who has previously described himself as “white trash”, had taken “every drug under the sun” by the age of 14, he said in court this week. If the teen series 21 Jump Street propelled him to pin-up status and his career took off with Tim Burton’s 1990 blockbuster Edward Scissorhands, he took to the off-screen role of Hollywood hellraiser just as easily. He didn’t just visit the Viper Room nightclub on the Sunset Strip, he bought it. When his close friend, fellow actor River Phoenix, died of an overdose at the club, there were wild claims that Depp had supplied the drugs himself.
His relationship with actress Winona Ryder defined early Nineties pop culture. When they split, Depp’s famous “Winona Forever” tattoo was amended to “Wino Forever” – another detail raised in court, as he denied slapping Heard for laughing at it. In the midnineties, his relationship with supermodel Kate Moss made them one of the most photographed couples on the planet. This week, he admitted trashing a hotel room the rock ’n’ roll pair stayed in, causing $10,000 of damage, but claimed, “rather than assaulting a human being I assaulted a couch”.
After they broke up in 1997, Depp appeared to settle down to some sort of domestic stability with French singer Vanessa Paradis, mother of their two children, Lily-rose and Jack, but the pair separated in 2012, and he began dating Heard, whom he married in a $1million wedding in 2014.
Meanwhile, Depp appeared to be morphing ever more closely into his Pirates of the Caribbean incarnation, Captain Jack Sparrow (whose persona is, in turn, borrowed from another of
Depp’s idols, Keith Richards). Rumours began to circulate that Depp used an earpiece on set, the implication being that he could no longer memorise lines – mirroring the descent of another of his heroes, Marlon Brando, into bloated excess. He has since confirmed that the earpiece part is true, but claims it is a soundtrack of “bagpipes, a baby crying and bombs going off ”, to allow him to “act with his eyes”.
While Depp once chased a paparazzo with a plank of wood outside a London restaurant for photographing his children, a celebrity snapper I speak to in LA reports never having witnessed him become violent. “He’s antagonistic, but I’ve never seen him instigate anything.”
His relationship with Heard, however, appears to have been incendiary. In January 2017, the pair released a telling divorce statement: “Our relationship was intensely passionate and at times volatile but always bound by love. There was never any intent of physical or emotional harm.”
Whether Depp’s career and reputation can ever recover remains to be seen; Winona Ryder and Vanessa Paradis are both due to give evidence, and next week comes Heard’s turn in the witness box. The entertainment industry’s productions might all be on pause, but the live-action Depp disaster movie still has another fortnight to run.
Whatever the outcome of the trial, no one is coming out of this looking good